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Yahoo buys startup run by 17-year-old entrepreneur

Tuesday - 3/26/2013, 6:40am EDT

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Yahoo is buying London startup Summly, the maker of a mobile application created by teenage entrepreneur seeking an easier way to read news stories and other content on the smaller screens of smartphones.

The deal announced Monday is Yahoo's fifth small acquisition in the past five months. All of them have been part of CEO Marissa Mayer's effort to attract more engineers with expertise in building services for smartphones and tablet computers, an increasingly important area of technology that she believed the Internet company had been neglecting.

As with its other recent acquisitions, Yahoo didn't disclose how much it is paying for Summly.

Summly makes a mobile application that condenses content so readers can scroll through more information more quickly. Summly founder Nick D'Aloisio began working on the app at his London home when he was 15. D'Aloisio is now 17, which makes him younger than Yahoo, which was incorporated in March 1995.

Although the Yahoo acquisition won't close until later this spring, D'Aloisio said the Summly will no longer be available. Summly's technology will return in other Yahoo products, D'Aloisio wrote in a Monday blog post.

D'Aloisio will work for Yahoo in its London office. Two other Summly workers will join Yahoo at its Sunnyvale, Calif. headquarters.

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